Wells Fargo analyst: Apple stock to grow with iPhone

David Paul Morris, Bloomberg

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc.

Wells Fargo analyst Maynard Um told me this week that Apple is still a growth story despite the shares falling 40 percent from their all-time high.

Um and members of Wells Fargo's technology investment banking team sat down with me this week during the bank's third annual Tech Transformation Summit at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco.

Um, a managing director and senior technology analyst, covers several tech giants including Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).

"I was covering Microsoft back when it was a mid-cap stock," Um said.

I was eager to ask Um how he presents new information and ideas on Apple, one of Wall Street's most heavily covered companies.

As a numbers guy, Um says one thing he likes to do is present clients with "picture books," taking an important number from Apple's regulatory filings and charting them over a period of time to help put the latest figure in proper context.

I asked whether Apple might be stranded in a no-man's land, no longer viewed as a high-growth company by growth investors and not fully embraced by value investors.

Um was quick to say that he still sees Apple as a "growth stock."

Um says his own profession might be to blame for Apple's dramatic decline, pointing to analysts at one time trying to one-up each other on their price target for Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) shares.

Um wisely declines to make any guess on when Apple's much-buzzed-about watch, television or less expensive iPhones will arrive on the market.

But he says Apple is becoming more of a product-cycle story, and that the debut of the next iPhone should enjoy greater economies of scale because components will be similar to the iPhone 5.

Mark Calvey covers banking and finance for the San Francisco Business Times.

Source: http://feeds.bizjournals.com/~r/vertical_47/~3/zQ81CfBAsIo/apple-wells-fargo-bank-technology.html

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